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Automatic Decisions
" Gut" Reactions
Mental
Simulation
Seeing the
Invisible
Your Gut Reactions
 Your gut reactions are truer than you think. The latest research
into have people make decisions demonstrates
that, contrary to popular opinion, our emotions do not interfere with our decisions. Our emotions are essential to making good decisions.
While they can often mislead
us, this is most often because we haven't been trained in useful models for
gut decision-making. Gutsy
decisions are the best decisions when arising from trained strategic
reflexes.
The oldest form of emotional reaction is the flight or fight reflex, a term
coined in 1920s by the American physiologist, Walter B.
Cannon. This reflex, found in all animals, involves
the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal gland.
Work during World War II by Hans Selye identified a longer lasting response,
the “General Adaptation Syndrome,” with which operates in response to longer-term exposure
to challenges to cause of stress.
Our understanding of the connections between
emotions and decisions has advanced considerably in recent years.
The traditional view, at least among cognitive psychologists, was
higher-level decision processes, were based on conscious, rational
reasoning. Now we understand that all such calculations depend heavily upon
how a person emotionally reacts to situations.
The first challenge to the idea of conscious choice was the research1 that
discovered
that our perceptions of situations form and affect our decisions before we
are consciously aware of them.
Through pairing of stimuli and response, we feel emotions that can guide our
decisions. These emotions can guide our decisions before we are consciously
aware of them. This has come to be called "somatic marker hypothesis."
Somatic means "body" as opposed to "mind."
Our enteric (intestinal) nervous system is wired
directly into the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that orchestrates our thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals.
When we get a feeling in our "gut," it is because our prefrontal
cortex recognized elements of situations that we cannot or have not yet put into words.
Research involving people with damage to their
prefrontal lobes2 has found that these patients were
described as “decides against his best interest,” “doesn't learn from
his mistakes,” “is impulsive,” “decisions lead to negative consequences,”
and so on.
What is the the name that psychologist give these
processes in the prefrontal cortex? Our executive functions.
When faced with unfamiliar and challenging
situations, these automatic functions of our prefrontal cortex generate
emotions that heavily influence our decision-making
processes. We cannot consciously control these effects to force ourselves to
make "rational" decisions that do not take our gut feelings onto
account.
In contrast, if faced with familiar situations, we
just as automatically respond in the ways that we have been trained to
respond. In many ways, the choice of response is unconscious. We automatically respond to situations we
recognize, focusing on the specific details of that response rather than
choosing it.
As
an article in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Science
explains:
"Recent years have seen a dramatic surge in research seeking to
understand the neural processes underlying how we make decisions and
choices. These investigations have been initiated by both behavioral
scientists, who have begun to see the usefulness of constraining
theoretical models with information gleaned from studying the brain, and
neuroscientists, who have become interested in using existing models of
decision-making to examine neural processing."
However, research also shows that, without
retraining our emotional reactions, our gut feelings can easily mislead us.
For example, research into decision biases3 shows that when
making judgments, we tend to rely on information that is ready
available rather than information that is critical. More recent research
into the source of decisions errors4
identified two other common problems as lack of experience
with a specific situation and, most importantly, ignoring anomalies because
they didn't fit a subject's mental
model of a situation.
The research into mental
simulations, shows that the best path to better gut decisions is so that
they have a basis for recognizing the key elements in complex situation to
generate the appropriate reactions. The system that we teach is, of course, Sun Tzu's classical front-line strategy,
but the only common alternative are process-oriented models. These models
teach people to view situations in terms a series of expected steps. While
process models are unquestionable valuable (we look at
a number of them here), they makes it too
easy for people to ignore anomalies. One of the greatest benefits of
mastering Sun Tzu's cognitive perspective is that it gives us an alternative
viewpoint as a cross check against our process-oriented models.
This cross training in Sun Tzu's cognitive models gives people a
broader, more stable basis for their emotional responses. To quote a recent
article by Bruce G. Charlton. MD, the editor-in-chief of Medical
Hypotheses, reviewing Damasio's latest work:
"I suggest that the somatic marker mechanism evolved
specifically to perform the job of ‘strategic social intelligence’.
Strategic can be contrasted with ‘tactical’ social intelligence, which is
found in many animals, and does not require large cognitive capabilities.
Strategic social intelligence is the ability to perform internal cognitive
modeling of social relationships, in order to understand, predict and
manipulate the behaviour of others - and is found only in animals with a
large pre-frontal cerebral cortex (humans and other apes and primates,
dolphins, elephants and some other social mammals)."
This strategic focus on the broader pattern of relationships is
precisely the focus offered by Sun Tzu's system and exactly why it is more
satisfying in terms of gut reactions that process- oriented models.
Both strategic reflexes and an understanding of process are required
for the highest levels of performance. Research into expert levels of
performance5 has also shown that anyone can
become an expert in anything through training, but that we cannot retrain
our gut reactions simply from reading and studying. In other words, reading
Sun Tzu's work doesn't change the way you make decisions on a gut level. We
can memorize a process easily enough, but that knowledge doesn't affect our
gut reactions. This is because we cannot "memorize" those strategic
relationships described by Charlton. The picture of those relationships is
only built from our experiences.
Our gut reactions are only changed based on our experiences and how
well those experiences are integrated into our mental simulations of
situations. The science about what is
required for a useful mental simulation is fascinating. Only by making
decisions do you integrate these models into your automatic reactions. This
is why our training, both live course and on-line training, constantly
challenges you to make decisions. Only by making decisions in light of this
model can you change the way you feel about being in competitive and
challenging situations.
1 Bechara,
Damasio, Tranel & Damasio (1997) Science 275:, 1293–1295
2 Dimitrov, Phipps, Zahn & Grafman, (1999) Neurocase 5:,
345–354
3 Kahneman, Slovic, Tversky (1992), Judgment under
uncertainty: Hueristic and biases. Cambridge University.
4 Klein (1993), Source of error in naturalistic decision-making tasks,
Proceeding of the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society 37th Annual Meeting
5 Ericsson and Charness (1994), Expert performance: Its structure and
acquisition. American Psychologist.
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